A few more heroes – Allen Ginsberg on his heroes – His words are excerpted from Victor Bockris‘ 1977 interview redacted and presented in his book Beat Punks. See also our earlier excerpts here and here
AG: Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche – Another hero of mine is Chogyam Trungpa. He seems to have carried forward a practical, visible, programmatic practice of agelessness, and provided a path for other people to walk on.
He’s a Tibetan Lama trained from childhood in meditation practices, and he’s translated the esoteric classical meditation practices into Americanese so that it’s available to hippies and middle-class people , and has entered into the American scene in a very energetic way founding the Naropa Institute (in Boulder, Colorado) of which the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics is a branch. He has made space for the natural perceptions and accomplishments that solidified here already in literature, and he see some correalations between our own natural intelligence and a kind of spacious wisdom characteristic of Buddhist liberation.
When I first et him, I thought he reminded me a lot of Kerouac, partly because of the drinking, partly because of the spontaneous shrewdness, partly because of the poetic nature of his talent drinks a lot of sake…He says he wants to be reborn a Japanese scientist.
John Lennon – Just about half a year ago before I went to each the summer at Naropa, I went up to visit John and Yoko, they were in the kitchen with their baby, in very good shape, following a very strict diet. They gave me a copy of Sugar Blues and warned me about the imperialistic addictive history of sugar. He said one of the reasons he wouldn’t stay in Hollywood was everybody was killing themselves on dope and alcohol, or a lot of musicians anyway – and he didn’t want to have a band unless he could have a band with musicians in good health.
Paul McCartney – I met Paul McCartney in his house in England in ’66. Mick Jagger was there, reading a book by Eliphas Levi – a French astrologer who supposedly taught Rimbaud in 1870, Rimbaud had met Levi in Paris – a book with some astrological or alchemical design on the cover – and McCartney was painting designs on a red velvet shirt, which he gave me as a present when I left.
I told him a little bit about Blake, and he told me a big long story about how The Beatles had first got high on acid , it was a very funny conversation, some friends had given the acid to them in their coffee, and they went out in their limousine to some nightclub, and they stepped on the pavement and were looking down into the nightclub stairwell, and it was all full of garish neon, and it looked like the big mouth of a monster. They didn’t know whether to go in or not. And then there were all these people around when they got out of their limousine, looking at them, so they had to go in. And then once they got in it was alright.
McCartney has a kind of sweetness, a cherubic quality. It’s in his music too.
Arthur Rimbaud – He’s a hero to those who know about him because he’s a model of life, and he had extraordinary physical beauty and beauty of mind. In a way he succeeded in possessing the truth inane body and one soul. He succeeded in completely entering his life and acting without looking backward, acting without second-guessing himself or without shadow-making gestures that had no shadows in the sense of self-conscious ego-manipulation. So that, despite his suffering, at the end of his life he seems to have been completely immersed in existence 100 percent. And he may have wound up dying in eternity rather than dying in a shadow world of lies and self-deception. Must read his late letters from Africa.
The only thing is, Rimbaud doesn’t seem to provide a “final solution” to ego or ego’s aggression. What Rimbaud is, is fantastic aggression and charm and intensity and intelligence, and a funny soft-spot kind of sexual humility, and openness to being fucked by life. But his myth seen crudely might lead younger people who don’t have some stable meditation into nonsensical suicides.
Patti Smith – I was surprised by Patti Smith’s rise (Allen speaking in 1977) – It’s sort of heartening to see how somebody else could get ahead I wonder how she’ll do.
I’ve been teaching Rimbaud this year – she idolizes Rimbaud – and I’ve been reading Rimbaud’s late, last letters, when he was dying, about how miserable life was and “all I am is a motionless stump” and I’m wondering how she’s going to deal with that aspect of heroism. How will she deal with the suffering? How will she transcend suffering and become a lady of energy, a sky-goddess, singing of egolessness? Because so far her proposition has been the triumph of the stubborn, individualistic, Rimbaud-Whitmanic ego , but there is going to be the point where her teeth fall out and she’s going to become the old hag of mythology that we all become. And I think she’ll be equal to dying – (Allen laughs) – We all are.